I am currently working on the design of my first build. I have the bed up to the riser plates decently figured out. Any insite on any portion is great by me! Having a tight garage, I needed a machine that would be the jack of all trades. Cutting foam up to 6" deep to cutting aluminum/hardwood plate, so I needed a deeper machine than most, as well as quite a bit sturdier.

Me being me, I can't ever be content with the norm, so I need to overbuild (and over complicate) things.

Right now the machine sits at a cutting area of around 26"x50"x6.5". Since I am using 1/2" acme screws, I have toyed with the idea of and made accommodations in my Y rail plates to accept a second motor at the other end, as well as a second lead screw and bearing block. Both gantries would ride on the same rails. Mounting them back to back like the picture below actually would extend the overall cutting length from 50" to around 60" for no increase in footprint.

This is not something I would do up front as it would require some extra programming to make sure that they do not get in each other's way. I would implement that down the road for a way to me to cut "faster", or potentially cut multiple materials/jobs at once. At this point, I just modeled both to make sure that both will fit so I have the option down the road.

I plan to implement motors on belts instead of direct drive, for two reasons. One, right now they are a 1:1 ratio, but if I need more speed or more torque, it is a simple pulley swap to achieve that. Two, my garage is large, but there are a ton of moving/falling things. I wanted to try and keep the motors away from the edges where they might get side swiped by a engine hoist or something. Plus, it reduces the overall foot print by a few inches on each side, for a not too much of a price increase.

In order to get the cutting bed low enough, I decided to go with bolting a few OpenBuilds rails together so that the Y axis is fully supported the entire length, and the distance from the Y-axis to the gantry isnt too high. I believe that the distance is only about 1/2" higher than the C-beam model.

When cutting harder materials than foam, I plan to have a secondary cutting bed that will sit on the shelf made by the horizontal C-beam to raise the bed up to within the same depth as the C-beam machine.